Please help! My friends computer has been hijacked by scammers?

Question

My friend has had a notice appear on his computer saying that he has been locked out by West Yorkshire Police and must pay one hundred pounds to have control of his computer again. What can he do to regain control of his machine?

Answer 1

You need to scan the boot sector. AVG and Malwarebytes trial versions both have this capability. You could also try using the system restore to set it back to an earlier point.

Answer 2

It should be noted that although certain ransomware pretends to encrypt some files, the West Yorkshire Police variant actually does encrypt some files. In this case, you should use a decryptor utility supplied by Kaspersky Lab.



This video shows how to remove the West Yorkshire Police ransomware:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gwMhaJHwro



This link leads to the RannohDecryptor utility, from Kaspersky Lab:



http://support.kaspersky.com/faq/?qid=208286527



Hope this helps.

Answer 3

my mum had the same problem, i tried everything in safe mode and nothing worked so i ended up going in safe mode and going back to factory settings and starting again x sorry but this was the only thing that worked for me.

Answer 4

Norton Antivirus could easily solve this and next time, PC Backup on iCloud would be a great idea (http://goo.gl/ZhRWV)

Answer 5

avast anti virus should clean this up----do a boot sector virus scan of the entire boot drive

Answer 6

it hasnt, run an antivirus